NYU Black Renaissance Noire Summer/Fall 2011 | Page 18

Is Just A Movie

Excerpted from the novel,
“It’s Just A Movie” to be published
in 2012 by Haymarket Books.

Right after Carnival, a fella from America come
down here to Trinidad, say he making movies
in the island. Big announcement. Big write-up.
Front page. He building up the movie industry.
Big talk. Local talent wedded to foreign technology,
the set of shit you hear already. But with the help
of the government and the business community,
the movie gets under way.
They have auditions. I set out to go.
As a well-known composer and singer
of calypso, a real calypsonian, not
just a fella who sing other people songs,
I don’t expect a problem. I will
show them. Forget calypso. I will be
a movie star.
So I go down at The Carib where they
picking people for the parts. Stanley,
Errol, Claude, Wilbert, Ralph, fellars
who act with the Theatre Workshop,
all of them there. Fellars from Strolling
Players, Best Village people: the Talent.
The fella from America, he has his
people, foreign industry, that he bring
with him. They give all of us a little
test, the audition. To recite from a
literary work. Ralph do something
from Hamlet, the big speech, ‘To be
or not to be.’ Errol do something from
Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey
Mountain. The Great Makak speech:
‘Sirs, I am sixty years old,
I have live all my life.

16

Like a wild beast in hiding.’

006-Fiction-Earl-Lovelace.indd 16

And I do for them a piece of my
Midnight Robber speech:
My name is Kangkala,
maker of confusion, recorder of
gossip,
destroyer of reputations, revealer of
secrets.
In the same skin, I am villain and
hero, victim and victor,
I reduce the powerful by ridicule.
I show them their absurdities by
parody.
I make their meanings meaningless
and give meaning to meaning.
I am the Dame Lorraine presenting
in caricature the grotesque of the
wicked, the deformity of the stupid,
the obzocky of gluttony.
I show the oppressors themselves
misshapen, gros toto, gros titi, gros
bondage.
Yes, I portray the big-stones man:
a bag of boulders bulging from
my pants,

By EARL
LOVELACE

I am the big-foot, sore-foot man, the
big-bottom, big-breasted woman.
I am the dispenser of afflictions.
I dance Bongo on top the graves of
the mighty.
Yes, Kangkala is my name.
But I was born again by a slip of
the tongue
when one night in the calypso tent,
as I am preparing to sing my song,
the Master of Ceremonies
introducing me decided to make his
announcement with an American
twang.
He said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this
is the song and this is your singer,
King Kala.’
So, suddenly so, in the interstice,
or, shall I say, the interspluce of
this mispronunciation of Kangkala
brought on by this Trinidadian fella
wanting to sound American,
calling Kang, king,
I was reborn to a new vision.
I had to find new histories to write,
ignored heroes to celebrate.
I began afresh to sing.
I became the poet of the revolution.

9/19/11 6:30 PM